This may be a bump but I can't seem to find the forum thread for this particular problem.

I can log into my GW account and it loads on character screen. However, when I click on my characters to play, it's stuck on Connecting at 0% --- logged off this morning and came back a few minutes ago and this happened.

I can not reinstall the game as it is digital download - guildwars.com is not working either. I'm new to game --- does this happen every Tuesday?

I am having this exact same issue. I just recently installed the game to my newest desktop after about 3+ years of not playing. I installed from the executable/installer and did the updates. Sometimes it will take me to the city but more times than not, it just speeds through loading about 100+ files (100+ to 0 in under a second) and then sits there doing nothing at 0 files remaining. When it does load and actually put me in the city I was last in, the game runs fine with no graphics issues or lag of any kind.

It's getting extremely frustrating. I have a wireless router but am also hardwired into my network.

My specs are as follows (not sure what you need so just throwing random stuff out there):

If you downloaded it digitally and it's a fresh install the game is trying to download every known update... which indeed takes a long time. This can lead you to thinking its stuck on 0% (I remember me thinking that a long time ago when I had this problem).

What you can do is use the "-image" command line argument to force the game to download every known update all at once (this usually takes a decent amount of time) instead of having the game download as you go... which is rather annoying.

To do this navigate to the file where you installed Guild Wars. The default location should be along the lines of "Local Disk (C: ) > Program Files > Guild Wars"

Locate "gw.exe", right click it, and create a shortcut on the desktop. Once you have the shortcut to "gw.exe" on your desktop right click it and go to "properties". In the "target" box you should see something along the lines of this: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" [quotes included]

In the target box add a [space]-image at the end of the command line. So now, it should look something like this: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" -image. Note that there is a space after the last quotation mark and the -image. Hit OK.

Now double click your shortcut and the download should start... As stated before this may take a good long time. I usually let mine run overnight or while I'm out doing something else.

This should fix your problem, if not then I'd wait for someone else to come along and help because I have no clue past that.

Womex: I did sort of figure that even tho it was at 0% it was (obviously) still loading something but I am extremely impatient and figured that if it had files to continue loading it would say it still had files, so I let it frustrate me. Once when I got into the game, I did a run halfway through my open areas trying to rebuild my map structures hoping that would help but it didn't, so I went searching for answers. Luckily I found this place!

This is exactly what I needed and hopefully it does the trick. Something to note tho, I found out you have to make a fresh desktop shortcut. I initially tried changing the properties of my original desktop icon and it wouldn't let me. It kept saying that target was invalid. It was either because I had already used that shortcut to play the game or because I was trying to paste the entire line from your post into the Target area instead of just adding to it.

Once I created a new desktop shortcut and then added (rather than completely deleting and attempting to paste) just the -image, it took the change and began downloading.

Thanks so much for your very detailed directions! I am detail oriented and was thrilled to see such specific instructions!

Now, once everything downloads do I remove this shortcut, change the Target line back to the original or is it okay to just leave it as is?

Remove the -image. That's all you need to do. -image will close the program upon completion of the download so it would only close the client right after you opened it if left there (when the download of the .dat is finished of course).

EDIT: Check the command lines available on the link provided by womex, some of them are pretty useful or can make useful tweaks like automatically logging to your account when you launch the game.